Conversations With My Reflection
by TheTruthBetween
Summary: She looked at her body, beyond her injuries, and it felt wrong. (Prequel to The Skin I'm In, part 2 of the Emile Prentiss series. Transgender (FTM) Prentiss. written Jan 2017)


_**DO NOT BIND WITH ACE BANDAGES!** It's painful and dangerous, and can cause things like cracked/broken ribs and collapsed lungs. Don't do it, it's not worth it, no matter how bad your dysphoria is._

 _As the names are French, I thought I'd add a small pronunciation guide. Robert is said like roe-bear, and Bardot, is bar-doe._

 _So the song for this fic was Avicii's Wake Me Up._

* * *

Emily stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom, looking at herself. Carefully, she brushed her fingertips over the brand on her breast, the rough lines of Doyle's shamrock. Moving down, she touched the edges of the second scar he'd given her, the angry red patch where a broken table leg had once protruded from her abdomen.

It had been a week since she'd gotten out of the hospital, five days since she'd arrived in France, and three since she'd had contact with JJ, receiving her passports and new banking information. She'd yet to leave the apartment for anything other than picking up groceries.

She'd been injured on the job before, concussions, contusions, lacerations... a dislocated shoulder, once, and a couple of gunshot grazes. But nothing had landed her in the hospital for longer than a night, nor required such intensive recovery.

She shifted, twisting, feeling the pull at her skin, the ache in her abdomen.

It felt wrong.

Looking at herself, she wondered why. It wasn't that her body wasn't yet 100% healed - she'd been injured often enough to know that the feeling of weakness would pass. She would heal, regain her strength, be back to her previous self. And yet, that thought, going back, made her cringe, and she didn't know why.

She looked at her body, beyond her injuries, and it felt wrong.

It was something about her breasts, she thought, bringing her hands up to cover them. When she'd started at the BAU, she'd been much more comfortable with her body, but as time passed, she found herself gravitating toward padded bras, hyper-feminizing her figure. But it wasn't right. She pressed her hands down, flattening her chest, and turned sideways, studying the lines of her body.

She liked it.

She dropped her hands, telling herself she was being stupid, and got dressed.

The thought that her body was wrong didn't go away.

It was driving her crazy.

A week had passed since Emily studied herself in the mirror, holding her breasts down and finding the resulting straight lines of her body pleasing. And that thought was relentlessly poking at her brain, driving her slowly insane.

Which was how she found herself in front of the mirror again, a pair of sweatpants slung low on her hips, upper body bare. The first aid kit was open on the counter, and she rolled the ace bandage between her hands. Looking at herself, the lines and curves of her body, she wondered when she'd gone from being proud of the perkiness of her breasts to wanting to flatten them down, pretend they weren't even there. She wondered if it mattered.

Slowly, she brought the bandage to her chest, holding one end in place as she rolled it around herself, adjusting her breasts as she did to flatten them as much as possible. Once the bandage was secured, she turned, looking at herself from different angles, then pulling on a large t-shirt and doing it again.

A tight feeling began in her stomach, twisting and rising, squeezing her heart and settling in her throat. Her eyes burned.

"What am I doing?" she asked her reflection, her voice lower and grittier through her emotion, sounding like her-not-her. Her own face stared back at her, unable to give her a satisfactory answer.

Resting her hands on the counter, she leaned forward, ignoring the uncomfortable pressure around her chest from the bandage. She hadn't bothered with makeup for a week and a half, and she found the bareness of her face oddly pleasing. Her hair, however, was all wrong. The long bob she'd gotten her first day in Paris just looked... strange, with her bare face and flat chest.

 _I look like a woman_ , the thought came to her, accompanied by a feeling she couldn't identify - something that wasn't quite sadness, wasn't quite disgust, but reminded her of both.

"I **am** a woman," she told herself, and watched her reflection almost flinch. _Why?_

What was it about being a woman that was suddenly so uncomfortable? (Suddenly? She thought of years spent proving herself to men, of discomfort being checked out, hit on, noticed and praised for her femininity, regardless of how she seemed to encourage it _because that's what being a woman was about_.)

Her ribs ached from the bandage, and her lungs protested the time spent with less oxygen than usual.

Her body told her to take the bandage off, but her reflection enticed her to keep it on.

A month. Emily had been in Paris for a month, and she felt like her life had turned upside down. She had no idea what she was doing.

It was like she'd taken the fact that Emily Prentiss no longer existed, and ran with it. Using it to completely reinvent herself in a way she didn't even understand yet.

Two days after she'd bound her chest with the ace bandage, she'd had the urge to do so again, despite remembering how her ribs had ached afterward. A few minutes Googling how to flatten breasts, and then, where to find a chest binder in Paris, and she'd been on her way, heading to the store and uncomfortably talking with the employee, figuring out her size and purchasing the innocuous-looking top.

Now, she sat, waiting for her name to be called, fiddling with her phone.

"Robert?"

Emily nearly startled, and stood. She showed the hair stylist the picture on her phone, and the woman chattered on as she combed and cut the dark locks, seeming to either not notice, or not care, that she was clearly addressing a woman by a man's name.

It relaxed the brunette, and she watched in the mirror as her hair was snipped away. It was a strange feeling of peace and anxiety as she looked at herself, taking in the flat lines of her chest, the masculine style of her hair as the stylist worked.

She knew, intellectually, that it probably just made her look butch, that people would assume she was a lesbian. But as she looked at herself, that wasn't what she saw. She saw the beginnings of a man, and somehow the just felt _right_.

Once the stylist was finished, she paid with a credit card that said 'Robyn Bardot' and the stylist smiled and said "Bonne journée, monsieur," and Emily walked out feeling like _he_ could tackle the world.

* * *

French translation:

Bonne journée, monsieur = Have a good day, sir.


End file.
